This week’s guest blogger is Maureen from Spoonful of Sped, she is here to chat all about work boxes and how they can work for each student! We all know how important independence can be for our students and work boxes can help with those skills!
It feels good when you accomplish a task that you’ve been working hard on right? Remember the first time you drove a car on your own after practicing with your family many many times? Or how about when you’ve perfected the recipe you saw on that cooking show after the 10th time trying to make it? Practice is how we all learn new skills.
How we practice is super important! In special education classrooms, work boxes (also referred to as task boxes) are how we practice some of our most important vocational and life skills. To keep the work meaningful for students check out these do’s and don’ts below to make your classroom work boxes a big success!
DO differentiate the skills you are having the students practice. As you know, our classrooms tend to have a wide range of student abilities. Make sure your task boxes reflect this. Try having multiple ways to “level up” a task for students that master easier steps.
DO take data on the tasks. Related to the item above, if we don’t have a plan for how students are doing, how can we tell when they’re ready to move on because they’ve mastered it? You can take data on a variety of things when using task boxes including time on task, number of prompts needed, number of items within a task the student completes as well as many others. Review the student’s IEP and find the way that makes the most sense to marry the task and the data- a perfect pair!
DO train your support staff on why and how we use these tasks. I’m sure we’ve all given a task box to a student and staff member to work on and they’ve finished it in 3 minutes when you thought it would take more like 20. Sometimes it’s due to students absolutely crushing the skill at hand. Other times, it’s because students and staff are not clear on the expectations of the task at hand. Think about including step by step directions, ways to decrease or increase the difficulty of the tasks, vocabulary, communication boards specific to the task… The sky’s the limit.
DON’T place workboxes in front of students without a game plan in mind. Sometimes, it’s easy to use a “plug and chug” type of approach by giving each student a taskbox that they may or may not have done a million times with some or limited success to keep them occupied.
DON’T limit your students to only working on task boxes! Some of my students’ favorite things to do can’t be contained in a shoebox. Right now, we’re sorting inventory for the Food Pantry and washing/sorting/folding clothes for the Community Closet. These are jobs that won’t be undone because the work is ongoing and the students love to see the ebb and flow of this school job. Think about using the workboxes as ways to support the larger tasks you’d like the students to engage in. If you’re hoping to run a school store one day, practice school store type tasks in the classroom first, then take it schoolwide.
DON’T undo student work when students are looking/in the classroom. If you had filled out an entire IEP proposal for a student of yours and then I deleted everything you did and said, “Good job, now do it again” you’d probably be ready to kill me. This is the same feeling that some of our students may experience when we undo their work boxes and make them repeat the same task they just completed. A better idea is to recognize the efforts they made, and then retire the work task to the shelf/closet or allocate it to the next student.
Importance of Independent Work
How to Set Up Independent Work
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